Trump’s America

Report: Trump Has Done a Great Job Profiting Off the Presidency

Presumably talking up the room service at the Trump International Hotel.

By Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

By multiple accounts, including those in Michael Wolff’sFire and Fury,Donald Trump never wanted or expected to become president. His whole campaign was reportedly a branding exercise, intended to raise his profile, burnish his ego, and ultimately bolster the value of the good Trump name following his inevitable defeat. Unfortunately for Trump, the electoral college had another outcome in mind. But though the job has come with a few obvious downsides—having to sleep in the dump that is the White House, restricting his cable TV time to four to eight hours a day—Trump has nevertheless succeeded in his initial goal of profiting off of it.

According to a new report compiled by Public Citizen, a liberal-leaning watchdog organization based in Washington, over the past year 64 “politicians, interest groups, corporations and entities affiliated with foreign governments” have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at Trump-branded properties. Among them were Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and his delegation, who stayed at Trump’s D.C. hotel during a September 2017 trip to Washington; a company tied to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which paid the hotel $270,000 for rooms, catering, and parking while lobbying to overturn a law that allows terrorism victims to sue foreign governments; the Kuwait Embassy, which held a National Day celebration last February at the Trump International Hotel; and the government-linked Turkey-U. S. Business Council and the American Turkish Council, which held a conference at the hotel in May and plan to do so again this year.

And that’s not counting the conference at Trump National Doral thrown by top execs whose companies are members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a private prison company’s leadership conference at the same property, and a holiday party for the William Koch-owned Oxbow Carbon LLC at Mar-a-Lago.

While we would never suggest that any of these individuals or groups were attempting to curry favor with the president by spending lavishly at his properties, experts believe such a thing is quite possible. “The motive varies from event to event, but a number of these seem clearly for the purposes of ingratiating with the president,” Public Citizen president Robert Weissman told The Wall Street Journal. Although Trump relinquished the day-to-day operations of the Trump Organization to Eric and Don Jr., he retained his financial interest in the family business through a trust that he can draw money from at any time, whether it’s for new Brioni suits or to fund his legal defense in the Russia probe. And though the Trump Organization claimed it would send any profits earned from foreign government payments by guests at its hotels to the Treasury, it declined to tell the Journal how that money is tracked, saying last month that it “expects to have information to share at the end of February.”

Meanwhile, foreign governments are reportedly rushing to ensure that the U.S. president is able to spread his brand of hospitality as far and wide as he would like; earlier this month, we learned that the Indonesian and Panamanian governments had both saw@ fit, post-election, to get involved in public-works projects surrounding Trump International properties. (A representative denied that the Trump Organization benefitted from these adjustments.)